Matt Damon in Eastwood's 'Hereafter'

A man named Jo is crushed by a truck in Henri-Georges Clouzot's brutal 1953 film, "The Wages of Fear." Dying, Jo imagines himself a child climbing a fence. What, asks his caregiver, do you see? Says Jo, with his last breath: "Nothing!"

Did I mention the film is French? Such bleak sentiments rarely surface in American movies, and "Hereafter," Clint Eastwood's solemn but ultimately reassuring peek over that fence, is no exception. It's well acted, intelligently written by Peter Morgan ("Frost/Nixon") and would like to say something new about a heck of an old subject. That, as you might imagine, is one tall order.

The very structure of the script - three strangers whose lives will converge - presupposes a cosmic order. A French news anchor, Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), has a near-death experience during the 2004 Asian tsunami. Marcus, a London schoolboy, yearns to contact his dead twin, Jason (George and Frankie McLaren, respectively). In San Francisco, George Lonegan (Matt Damon) is a lonely psychic who curses his gift.

As a director, Eastwood can be hit ("Unforgiven") or miss ("Blood Work"), and here he's both. His powerful re-creation of the tsunami will put the fear of God into you, but his vision of the afterlife - white light, blurry figures - is banal and familiar. Marie's transformation into a true believer mimics that of Richard Dreyfuss' Roy Neary in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," a movie that was already an allegory for spiritual epiphany. And although Damon is convincing, the reluctant psychic is not exactly a novelty (think "The Dead Zone" for starters).

Eastwood, at 80 years old, may well be thinking about death. His film, however, is only pretending to. "Hereafter" asks no questions that it hasn't already answered. Spoiler alert: There is an afterlife, and everything will be OK.